


linger at my door

by liadan14



Series: ready for the comedown [1]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Bad Poetry, Bottom Booker, Canon Queer Character of Color, Canon Queer Relationship, Double Penetration, Iffy Communication Skills, M/M, Misunderstandings, Mutual Pining, Oral Sex, Overstimulation, Phone Sex, Polyamory, Polyamory Negotiations, Several Years of Foreplay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-08
Updated: 2020-08-08
Packaged: 2021-03-06 00:27:37
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25784383
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/liadan14/pseuds/liadan14
Summary: The first package reaches him two weeks into his exile. Two weeks is nothing. Two weeks is a blip on the radar of Booker’s existence. Two weeks is a long time to be drunk.The address on the package is printed out – no marks to indicate the sender – and there’s no postage stamp, just a sticker with a bar code from the post office. It could be explosives, Booker’s experience warns him, but it’s not as if it really matters. He loosens the glue holding the package open and reaches inside.It’s a fucking FC Internazionale Milano jersey.OR: While Booker is trying to atone for what he did, Joe and Nicky are trying to atone for what they didn't do. It takes a while for them to sort out all their crossed signals.
Relationships: Booker | Sebastien le Livre/Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolo di Genova
Series: ready for the comedown [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1890964
Comments: 66
Kudos: 680





	linger at my door

Booker’s been alone before. In 1788, scared and in Paris in a uniform too big for him, realizing too late that he’d been sent there so he wouldn’t starve with his siblings when the crops failed; in 1795, in church, waiting, sipping nervously from a flask when his future father-in-law couldn’t see, his own family dead or absent; in 1812 in the Russian snow. 

Since 1812, he’s been both alone and not alone at all times.

It’s the kind of half-life a man of his constitution is supremely ill-suited to.

(“A man of your constitution,” he imagines Andy laughing. “What a load of bunk.”)

(Joe would have understood. Joe loved the romantics Booker grew up alongside.)

In a way, it’s easier, now he’s fully alone. It spares him the constant hope of being a part of something only to fall short over and over, caught just outside of the palpable electricity between Joe and Nicky, outside the centuries of affection between them and Andy. Leaves him caught between dreams of drowning and waking and drowning again and memories of his sons’ expressions when he’d last seen them, bitter and hardened and everything Booker had never wanted for them.

Booker doesn’t believe in purgatory anymore, but when he did, he imagined it nicer than this. Dante had painted such evocative pictures of the lost souls in purgatory lying prone, atoning endlessly for their sins. Maybe Booker’s in hell, instead, chained to the pit of the ninth circle where those who betray their loved ones belong. Booker’s been nothing but a traitor all his immortal life, first to those he left behind to face a mortal death, and now to his immortal family. Then again, he’s always felt more like the poor fuckers in the first circle, buffeted about by the wind with no chance to stop. He’s certainly guilty enough of lust for it.

(He thinks of the face Nicky makes whenever anyone mentions hell having any sort of circles. Booker had spoken some Italian before they met, but he’d learned most of the innovative and outdated curse words he knows listening to Nicky talk about Dante.)

(God, _Nicky_ , trussed up, tortured and still telling Joe not to yell at Booker.)

Some days, there aren’t bottles deep enough for all the life Booker’s spent doing things he wants to forget.

The first package reaches him two weeks into his exile. 

Two weeks is nothing.

Two weeks is a blip on the radar of Booker’s existence. 

Two weeks is a long time to be drunk. 

The address on the package is printed out – no marks to indicate the sender – and there’s no postage stamp, just a sticker with a bar code from the post office. It could be explosives, Booker’s experience warns him, but it’s not as if it really matters. He loosens the glue holding the package open and reaches inside.

It’s a fucking FC Internazionale Milano jersey.

He debates sending Joe a _fuck you_ text, but Joe probably dumped his last burner phone after Merrick and Booker doesn’t have the new number.

He debates picking the most obnoxious French team he can and sending Joe their jersey, but that would mean picking through surveillance footage and travel logs and actively figuring out where the team currently is and Booker doesn’t want to do that to himself or them.

He debates burning the stupid thing.

In the end, he leaves it draped over the back of a chair, mocking him every time he walks in.

He’s spent enough time working the stock market in the last century or so that he could probably live pretty comfortable for the next hundred years on what he has saved, as long as he forges his own name and inheritance a few times. There’s not a lot to do but go out, get drunk, come back, stare at the jersey, and get drunk some more.

Months pass, and Booker receives nothing more. He wonders if he should have acknowledged the gift, but it’s too late for that now.

When Quyhn leaves his apartment (and him) a bloody disaster, Booker understands through a haze of brandy and pain that the Paris apartment is done for. He relocates to Tallinn within twelve hours, and he takes the jersey with him.

“Great,” he mutters to himself, unpacking the non-essential goods he had stuffed into his rucksack but keeping the rest inside in case he needs to run again. “Now Joe can mock me in every country.”

The jersey, for lack of alternatives, hangs on a chair in the same place it did in Paris.

A week later, the DVD arrives. 

“People don’t even buy DVDs anymore, Joe, it’s a streaming world,” he tells Joe as he unpacks it. 

He stares for a moment.

“Fuck you, Yusuf,” he says then, and repeats it in just about every language he can.

Because he doesn’t have a whole lot of other things planned that evening, Booker picks up a tub of Ben & Jerry’s at a gas station and watches the DVD on his laptop with ice cream and red wine.

He still cries at the end. 

They had taken a commercial airline from Sydney to Singapore to Frankfurt shortly after it came out. None of them can sleep on commercial airlines, too many people and too many cameras and at least for Booker, the constant awareness that as soon as they land, he’ll have to spend about four hours painstakingly deleting video footage. The on-flight movie selection had been pretty broad, but too modern for any of their tastes. Booker had finally picked _Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again_ in the hopes it would be dumb enough to let him focus on memorizing the faces surrounding them in case any of them were taking pictures on their phones.

Joe, two aisles behind him, had caught him wiping away a tear at the tail end of the film. He’d remained impassive throughout the entire rest of the flight, upholding the façade they didn’t know each other. 

In the safehouse (cave. It was a cave by the Main river. Booker half expected Siegfried to come looking for his gold), Joe had then spent the next four days trying to talk to him about what a talented actress Meryl Streep was and how the movie thematised parenthood.

Booker hadn’t had the words to talk about parenthood.

He wonders now if maybe, just maybe, that was Joe offering a listening ear and Booker had misheard him.

“Fuck you, Joe,” he repeats to himself, and then skips back a chapter in the DVD menu to rewatch the scene in the church at the end of the movie.

It becomes a mantra, something he says to himself when he walks in or out of the apartment and sees the chair where the jersey and the DVD rest (the movie having long since been downloaded to Booker’s external hard drive).

In due time, they are joined a sushi for beginners cookbook (Booker has tried sushi, thank you very much, and actually quite likes it, but will never tell Joe about that because Joe has been after him to try sushi since the 1830s and fuck if Booker’s giving in now), a pair of suspenders that are not fashionable and never have been no matter what Joe says, and a bouquet of wooden flowers.

Eventually it gets boring, getting drunk all day and staring morosely at a pile of shit that pisses him off mostly because Joe meant to piss him off and it fucking worked. Booker develops a routine mostly to get himself out of the house and away from Joe’s weird mementos.

“Fuck you, Joe,” Booker says when he leaves in the morning, bleary-eyed and in need of coffee on his way to Tallinn University.

“Fuck you, Joe,” Booker says when he gets in every night from his classes, dropping his keys on the table.

“Fuck you, Joe,” he mutters over at the chair while he types away at his master’s thesis in computer science at three AM on a Wednesday.

“I’m not Joe,” Nicky answers.

Booker’s heart rockets into his throat. “What happened?” he asks. “Was it Quynh?”

“Andy’s taking care of Quynh.”

“Oh. Well. Good.”

Nicky gives him a half-nod, like he’s a priest welcoming his congregation. Booker wonders if he ever had a tonsure, or if he was a priest before tonsures. 

Booker swallows drily, his throat clicking. He closes his laptop, sets in on the table and rubs his palms on his sweatpants.

“Sit,” Nicky says, gesturing to the Joe chair. 

A part of Booker wants to protest. The chair is a shrine. The chair is a fuck you.

Nicky’s looking straight at him, gaze level and harsh.

Booker sits in the chair.

“Tell me, have you been enjoying all these gifts Joe showers you with?”

“Yes?” Booker says. “No?”

“Which?”

“Both.”

“Hm.”

Booker twitches away from the intensity of Nicky’s scrutiny. Nicky’s hands encircle his wrists, holding them fast to the chair.

“I don’t understand, Nicky,” escapes him in a whisper.

“What’s to understand?” Nicky asks, leaning closer, boxing Booker in.

Booker closes his eyes to escape him. “I have ninety-eight years to go, you should—“

“We should leave you alone to do your penance, you think?” Nicky asks, conversational. “Let you stew in your own juices, ruminating on your own sorrow and guilt?”

There’s no answer but _yes_ , but Booker doesn’t dare give it. It feels wrong.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? A nice, long sulk.” Nicky’s voice is low and right by Booker’s ear, and he opens his eyes to find Nicky’s face a hair’s breadth from his own. “More time to make this all about _you_.”

“You exiled me,” Booker points out. It’s a mistake.

Nicky shoulders between his legs, dropping gracefully to his knees, and suddenly Booker understands that he’s way out of his depth here. “We sent you away,” Nicky agrees. “You hurt us.”

“I’m sorry—“

“You hurt us when you should have trusted us.” He hitches Booker’s thighs up over his shoulders and Booker is suddenly aware that he is entirely at Nicky’s mercy. “And we ignored your pain.”

“I’m sorry,” Booker tries again.

Nicky makes an impatient noise. “It’s not enough,” he says. “You must suffer our love for you.” He demonstrates this point by pulling Booker’s sweatpants down and setting his mouth to Booker’s cock.

It’s not like Booker has been uninterested in the proceedings so far. There’s an understated danger to Nicky he’s always found magnetic, and to have it directed at him, like this? The adrenaline of it had him half-hard already. The soft touch of Nicky’s lips to the head of his dick is an electric shock in comparison to that familiar note of frustrated arousal.

He can’t move, his legs hooked over Nicky’s shoulders, hands white-knuckled on the armrests of the chair, his t-shirt rucked up at his back and the rough seams of the jersey’s number rubbing into his back, goddamn Joe for buying the high-quality one with the number sewn on instead of the cheap screen-printed one.

Nicky is talented – of course he is, he couldn’t bear to be anything less at something he’s been practicing for hundreds of years. His mouth is a furnace and his tongue is a tease and Booker hasn’t had anyone give him this kind of undivided attention in longer than he cares to admit. Nicky’s hands are brands, holding his right wrist fast and clamping his left hip down onto the chair, pressing him against the corner of the plastic cover of the DVD.

Booker’s talking again, he realizes, and Nicky’s mouth is too full to stop his apologies and his pleas from weighting the air between them.

“Please,” he’s saying, first in Italian and then in French, “please, it’s too good, I can’t, I won’t survive it, please, Nicky, I’m sorry, I—“

Nicky either doesn’t hear or doesn’t care and gives Booker no inch, tongue flat and harsh on the most sensitive parts of Booker, making tears leak out the sides of his eyes with how _much_ he feels, how unable he is to get away from it, how unable he is to move at all.

He sobs when he comes, spilling messily down the back of Nicky’s throat, the chair’s right arm splintering under his grip.

Nicky licks his lips, rocks back on his heels, Booker’s legs dropping heavily from his shoulders and onto the floor. He stands, the line of his own erection clear even in the dark of Booker’s apartment. Booker reaches for him, clumsy with his own orgasm, shaky in his own skin.

Nicky shakes his head. “Not the terms,” he says.

“Huh?”

A ghost of a smile steals across Nicky’s face. “Call it another gift from Joe,” he says, and pulls the neck of his shirt down to show the wire.

Booker shudders all over with the knowledge that Joe listened to every minute of that.

He wonders where Joe is watching from.

The door closes heavily behind Nicky.

The next morning, Booker’s on a plane to Osaka. He has a change of clothes, his laptop, a football jersey, a banged-up DVD, a cookbook, a pair of suspenders and a wooden rose in his backpack.

On a whim, he hacks into Copley’s records and ferrets out the team’s current hide-out.

He sends Joe the most nondescript postcard of Mount Fuji he can find and scrawls a dirty limerick on the back – _there once was a man from Genoa/who had travelled from Taiwan to Bilboa/he sucked cock like a pro/when his lover told him so/and I wish I had come a bit slower_.

Joe sends him nothing for the entire six months he spends in Osaka.

 _Fine_ , Booker thinks. Message received. 

-

In Sacramento, the flip phone Booker keeps charged just in case he’s ever needed rings.

(In truth, it’s charged in case he ever needs them so much he can’t stand it.)

(Some days, he has to turn it off because the temptation is too much.)

The ring is a shock. It’s loud, piercing through the haze of the coffee shop Booker’s sitting in with a woman from his yoga class. (He’s the only man in the class and the single moms have imprinted on him because he can get them the best seats at the readings in the children’s section of the library. Possibly also because he’s French, a librarian, and taking a yoga class.)

“Sebastian?” She asks. “Is that your phone?”

Booker flinches sharply at the second ring. “Yes,” he says, “yes, it is.”

A second later, he realizes he should answer it, and he digs through his messenger bag for the damn thing.

“I’m sorry, Louise,” he says. “I have to leave.”

He manages to get the damn phone open just as he’s shutting the door to the shop behind himself.

“You took your time,” Joe says.

“Joe,” Booker says, out of breath.

“Busy, are you?” 

It’s been almost three years since Booker last saw Joe, back turned, retreating up a stairway Booker had to wait ten solid minutes to follow him up so that he didn’t accidentally run into the team moments after being exiled. In that time, he’s been a drunkard, he’s been a grad student, he’s been a barista, he’s been a security expert and he’s been a librarian. He’s filled his days. 

“Never too busy for you,” he says.

Joe laughs, warm and intimate in Booker’s ear as he speedwalks down Sacramento’s streets towards his apartment. “Always the charmer,” he says, as if he hadn’t swept Nicky off his feet every day for nine hundred years.

“Is everything alright?” Booker asks, because he needs to.

“Fine, fine,” Joe says, and Booker can picture the gesture he makes as he says it so clearly it’s almost like Joe’s here, in front of him. “I was just thinking about you.”

“I thought you’d forgotten me,” slips out of Booker’s mouth when he’s paying too much attention to a busy intersection to watch what he says.

“You miss my gifts, then?”

Booker rubs at the scruff on his jaw. “Miss your gifts…I miss you.”

“I miss you, too, Sebastien.”

Booker pauses by a streetlamp, staring straight at a printout of someone’s missing cat and seeing none of the letters because his eyes are so blurry with tears.

“Are you still there?” 

“Yes,” Booker says, then clears his throat. “Yes, I’m still here.”

“Do you still have my gifts?”

“All but the last,” Booker says and then wants to shoot himself through the tongue.

Joe chuckles. “Yes, that would be a hard gift to keep. Maybe it was more of a loan.”

Booker’s heart is racing, both from walking so fast towards his apartment and from the whiplash of this conversation. Joe’s tone, warm and intimate, has his libido (essentially dead since Osaka) perking up in an extremely inconvenient way, even as his tears still threaten to spill over. “It was a very appreciated loan.”

“Mm,” Joe says. “On all sides.”

Booker doesn’t dare ask. He doesn’t dare breath in the hope Joe will elaborate of his own accord.

“Nicky was wild with it by the time he got to me,” Joe says, like this is a normal conversation to be having on a Tuesday morning at eleven. “He left you spread out and open for him and he came straight to me.”

“Did he?” Booker asks unsteadily, gait shifting to accommodate rapidly growing interest.

“Oh yes,” Joe answers readily. “I was right across the way, that high-rise with the blown-out windows on the twelfth floor.”

Booker knows the high-rise. He’d maybe picked the apartment for the comfort of always being able to imagine himself within a sniper rifle’s sight.

“Nicky stormed in just after he left you,” Joe continues. “He was raging with it – with me, really. You should have seen him. You know how he is, when he gets like that.”

Booker knows.

“He had me, right up against the door. I knew what he’d be like, fingered myself open listening to him blow your mind on the wire. He didn’t even ask, just lifted me up and plunged right in.”

A noise leaves Booker’s throat, then, rough and involuntary.

“Nicky gets like that, when he’s too turned on. Pre-verbal. It’s really good for my ego.”

If Booker were at all able to talk or think or do anything besides hunt blindly for his keys to get out of public and into his stupid, empty, lonely apartment, he would tell Joe he really doesn’t need help in the ego department.

“It was amazing. Like that, when he holds me up? Always hits the right spots, just perfect. He didn’t even touch me, I came all over him thinking about what he’d just done to you.”

Booker whimpers, sliding down to sit against of his barely closed door, painfully hard and totally confused.

“He said your name when he came, Book,” Joe tells him. “I don’t know if I should be insulted by that, given that I was the one who had come dripping out my ass for the next hour. Then again, I was also the one who told him to make you forget every other blowjob you’d ever had.”

Not a hard task, if Booker’s being honest, but fuck if he’ll admit that to Joe. He palms over the fly of his pants and his hips surge up off the floor. It’s like nerve endings that have been killed dead since Tallinn have suddenly come back online, doing Joe’s bidding as seamlessly and ruthlessly as Nicky did.

Joe laughs. “You’re thinking of it now, aren’t you? How good his mouth was, how good he’d feel inside you? I know he is. I had to tie him to the bed or he wouldn’t have let me finish this conversation.”

It’s not a conversation, it’s Joe utterly destroying the last of Booker’s functionality. He tries to say as much, but it comes out a deep, drawn-out groan.

“Had to sit on his cock for him to be able to stand this phone call. You know how much he wants you, Book? He's throbbing inside me. I told him he couldn't move until I hung up.”

Booker comes, then, hips hitching up helplessly to grind against the palm of his hand, pants still buckled, shooting sticky against the cotton of his boxers, wet and messy and so good.

Joe groans down the phone line, like he’s finally allowed Nicky to move within him. “He feels so good inside me, Booker. You know how good he feels?”

Coming off the first orgasm he’s had in months, reeling from whatever it is Joe is doing to him, Booker says, “I only know how good you feel.”

The phone line disconnects and Booker draws his knees up to rest his forehead on them, sticky mess in his pants shifting uncomfortably with each indrawn breath as he sobs.

-

The thing is, they’ve been here before. The foreplay had been less elaborate – six months of weighted stares, Booker awkwardly vacating the apartment just a little later than he should have when he could tell they were in that kind of mood on the off-chance he’d catch a glimpse (and he did, several).

They were drunk and in Belgium, never a good combination as far as Booker is concerned, but it was the 1870s and it seemed like the best place to stop the brutal tracks of imperialism over the rest of the world. 

That mission had been a catastrophic failure, and by the time they had understood that, it had been too late. Andy had taken a train towards Dover, intent on going back to her search for Quynh. Booker had been alone with Joe and Nicky. 

Accepting their invitation to bed when they had all been drinking gin was a bad idea Booker should have seen coming a mile away. The stuff had caused riots. But Booker had never claimed to be all that smart. Their fingers had been clumsy with alcohol, but it was the first time since his sons’ deaths that Booker felt like a real human again, held fast between Nicky and Joe, Joe driving into him from behind and erasing all thought from his head besides the pulse of Joe’s hips and the taste of Nicky’s lips.

In the morning, Joe and Nicky had been gone, leaving only a note that they would rendezvous in a few months in London with Andy.

None of them have spoken about it since.

Booker gives himself a day to wallow in his own idiocy, then packs up all the stupid shit Joe gave him and leaves for Bogotá.

They’re waiting for him on the doorstep of the safehouse there.

“Why do you keep running from us?” Joe asks him, arms spread wide, as if to finally, finally include Booker in the expansive embraces he envelops everyone into.

“Running from you?” Booker asks incredulously.

“You leave Tallinn, you leave Osaka, you leave Sacramento…”

“You found me there,” Booker says. “I’m not supposed to have any contact with you.”

Joe gives him a look like he’s being exceptionally dumb. “What do you think we’ve been doing?”

“Showing me what I can’t have? Reminding me to keep my distance?”

Joe’s face crumples in on itself, and Booker starts to feel like he’s sat down in a classroom where he thought he was learning one thing, but it turns out it’s a totally different lecture and he’s left it much too late to subtly leave the room.

“This is why I thought we should talk to him, not send cryptic gifts,” Nicky tells Joe.

“Didn’t see you trying,” Joe mutters. 

Nicky is impassive. “I wasn’t sure I was ready to trust him again, after everything.”

“And now you are?”

“I think we’ve done enough damage to each other, over the years.”

“That’s not an answer,” Booker says, his bag still clutched tight in case he needs to turn on his heel and head back to the airport. He's handled three years, he can handle the other ninety-seven if they would just let him.

Nicky looks over at him, then, and Booker remembers Tallinn and being flayed utterly open by the steadiness of Nicky’s gaze. “Watching you these last months – I think I understand why you did it. You’re always ready for us to push you away, aren’t you?”

“I don’t belong,” Booker says.

“That’s our mistake. Yours was to run from us.”

He gestures into the open doorway, beckoning Booker inside, and abruptly, Booker can’t do it. He shakes his head mutely, stumbling backward, fumbling the strap on his bag.

“Do you not want us?” Joe asks like it’s breaking his heart.

Booker laughs without humor. “I have never wanted anything more. I never want anything else anymore.”

“Then come with us,” Nicky says.

“I can’t,” Booker begins, and wishes he were like Andy for a moment, able to speak his most bitter truths with wry humor, so jaded that nothing touches him. He feels scraped raw, like he’s been left out in the sun too long and his skin has baked into the wrong shape. “I can’t leave again. I can’t watch you leave. I need too much from you.”

He’s shaking, he realizes distantly, all these things at the forefront of his mind he didn’t think he would ever say, when Joe is suddenly by his side, clasping his arm by the elbow. “We won’t ask you to leave,” he says.

Booker looks up blankly at Nicky. He’s the one still standing by the door and he is the one who will ask Booker to leave.

Nicky smiles at him. “We won’t leave you, either,” he says. “I’m sorry we ever did.”

“I don’t understand,” Booker says through numb lips.

Joe’s arm around his waist is all that gets him through the door, Nicky steering the both of them to collapse on the dusty gray couch they bought in the 1960s, last time they were here. “Booker,” Joe says. “Nicky is my moon.”

It’s a strange turn of phrase, but not one Booker has never heard before – he’s heard a hundred verses about Nicky that start in that vein. He’s just not sure why Joe is telling him now.

Nicky’s pressing a glass of water into his hand, and Booker drinks it because Nicky’s right – he’s dehydrated and confused and it doesn’t matter because it won’t kill him but maybe water will make him understand what’s happening here.

“Nicky is my moon,” Joe repeats, “and you were like a distant star, orbiting us. We wanted you closer, but we couldn’t tell—” He halts, losing track of the metaphor.

“We couldn’t tell if you were part of our solar system or a meteorite that would destroy us on impact,” Nicky finishes for him, finally reaching out to touch Booker, hand soft against his cheek. “So we ran from you and we didn’t see that the only thing you were destroying was yourself.”

“And now?” Booker asks.

“Now we know that we were idiots,” Joe says, not without humor. “Now we know that I should have told you I was angrier at myself for not seeing your pain than I was at your betrayal. Now we know that we shouldn’t have left you in Belgium, alone, without telling you that we were scared.”

“Scared?”

Nicky presses a kiss to his temple. “Nearly nine hundred years, and we’d never asked anyone else into our bed,” he says. “I had never even thought of it, until you.”

“You were scared I would tear you apart,” Booker realizes, grasping at what they’ve been trying to say like flyaway dandelion seeds, the meaning so distant to him it’s nearly impossible to catch. “And I nearly did, I nearly got you both trapped in that lab forever—”

He’s shocked silent by the dry press of Joe’s lips against his.

“We were scared we would have to make a choice between you and each other,” he says, his forehead pressed softly against Booker’s.

Booker shuts his eyes, unable to process everything he’s hearing. “I would never ask that,” he says. “I know I could never come between you.”

“That,” Nicky tells him, “is because you are smarter than us.” He kisses the side of Booker’s neck, and it’s sharp and prickly with stubble. They must have been hot on his heels if Nicky didn’t even take the time to shave.

“Do you mean I can come home?” He asks, trying to breathe as deeply as he can, feel as much as he can of their warm, animal bodies before they tell him no.

“We mean,” Joe says, his hand tangling with Nicky’s around Booker’s body, holding him fast to the couch, “that we want you to be home when you are with us.”

Booker's strings are cut. He falls forward into Joe’s embrace, nose tucked tight to Joe’s collar. He smells of stale sweat and airplane and the sheets Booker had woken up alone in once in Bruges. Nicky is close behind, holding him tight, broad hands sliding across Booker’s body in smooth strokes. 

“I love you,” Booker whispers into their skin, “I’ve loved you, I’m so sorry.”

The mass of limbs around him shifts, hot words in his ears, “I love you, too,” over and over until Booker thinks he could burst with everything he’s feeling.

They rest like that, together, until Booker has stopped crying, until Joe’s beard is damp with his own tears, until Nicky has kissed the wetness from both their cheeks, bright-eyed himself. 

“Look at us,” he laughs wetly, his hand still firm around Booker’s hip. He rests his chin on Booker’s shoulder, and Joe leans forward to kiss him.

“Are we a mess?” Joe asks. He moves to Booker’s other side, pressing kisses up and down his neck.

“Not yet,” Nicky says. He turns his head to mirror Joe, to kiss the others side of Booker’s neck. The softness of his lips, the scrape of his stubble – Booker shudders all over.

He can feel Joe’s lips twitch into a smile.

“Smug bastard,” he rasps out.

“You have no idea,” Nicky mutters, tonguing Booker’s earlobe.

“Says the man who had the limerick Booker wrote about him _framed_ ,” Joe says. He grasps a handful of Booker’s hair and pulls his head back, making Booker gasp.

Nicky’s hands slide under Booker’s shirt. “If you had two beautiful men write poetry about you, you would appreciate it, too.”

Booker wants to laugh at that – more at the classification of his poor efforts as poetry than anything else – but Nicky’s fingers are at his nipples and he doesn’t know what to do with himself anymore but writhe between them and beg wordlessly for more.

“How long has it been for you, Booker?” Joe murmurs in his ear and Booker flashes into a full-body sense memory of coming in his pants to the sound of Joe’s voice yesterday. It feels like it’s been years.

“I don’t know,” Booker rasps. 

Nicky, mouth occupied, makes a questioning noise.

“I haven’t wanted – this – in a long time,” Booker pants out. He considers telling them about failed one-night-stands he couldn’t work up the interest for, long months when he hadn’t even had the urge to touch himself, lost in grief and numb to everything but alcohol. But that isn’t for now.

“Do you want this now?” Nicky asks, concerned.

“ _Yes_ ,” Booker says, sharp, hips hitching as Joe’s thumb strokes along his inner thigh. “I feel like my body was asleep until you touched it. Joe, _please_.”

Joe smiles against his lips, kissing him softly, thoroughly, but Nicky’s not done.

“Yesterday,” he says. “On the phone – and in Tallinn?”

Booker lets his head fall back against Nicky’s shoulder. Nicky’s taken off his shirt, he realizes dimly, when his head meets only muscle and skin. “Yesterday was the first time I felt anything since Tallinn,” he says. “Tallinn might have been the first time since Bruges.” He’s actually kind of amazed he gets the whole sentence out. 

“Tell us more,” Joe rasps, flicking open the buttons of Booker’s shirt one by one. 

“I’ve been lost,” Booker says, unable to deny them anything when two sets of warm hands are tracing patterns up his ribs. “I’ve been asleep and I only ever woke up when you called to me. No one could make me feel like—“ he gasps when Joe pinches at his nipples.

“Good,” Nicky says in his ear, and Booker thinks his voice has slid down into an octave he’s never heard before, rough and pleased. 

Joe makes a rough noise of frustration against his collarbone, pushes him back to lean against Nicky, so he can kneel back and undo the fly of Booker’s pants, pull them off his legs, leaving Booker naked save his open shirt. He’s hard, wet at the tip, almost delirious with how hard his blood is pumping through his veins, present in his own body in a way he hardly remembers feeling. 

“Did you come for us, yesterday?” Nicky asks, still curious, even as Joe rises to strip off his own clothes and Booker gets lost in watching each new strip of skin appear. 

“Yes,” he says, “I barely even had to touch myself.”

Joe smirks as he tosses the last of his clothes behind him. “Nicky was the same,” he says, “as soon as you reminded us of Bruges, he was shooting off inside me even though I hadn’t even let him fuck me properly yet.”

Booker’s hips grind back to find Nicky hard as well, pushing against his ass. “I thought you hung up because I overstepped,” he admits.

“He hung up because he was too hard to keep talking,” Nicky murmurs against him.

Booker’s can’t keep his mouth closed anymore, heaving in desperate breaths trying not to overwrite what he’s seeing right now with the images in his mind, Nicky under Joe, tied to the bed and coming helplessly before they’d even gotten to fuck, Joe with his cock standing straight up, grinding against Nicky’s softening dick until he was shooting off all over his own belly.

“ _Please_ ,” he says, in the hope that this time they will listen.

Joe’s body is warm when he blankets Booker from the other side again, as if neither of them want to leave him untouched while the other gets up, and Booker appreciates it, he does, but he might claw out of his skin if they don’t _do something_ to him soon.

Nicky’s fingers are wet when he returns to the couch and Booker sobs open-mouthed into Joe’s shoulder when he slides the first inside. Joe’s voice is gentle, comforting, pet names in French and Italian and Arabic whispered into Booker’s hair even as his clever fingers wrap around Booker.

“I’ll come,” Booker warns. “Don’t.”

“Hurry,” Joe tells Nicky thickly. “Please.”

Booker reaches for Joe, then, clumsy with desperation, grips his thick cock. “I dreamed about you for years,” he says, not sure if he’s speaking to Joe or Joe’s cock. “That was the first time I’d ever been fucked, you know?”

“I didn’t,” Joe grits out like it’s hurting him.

“Ruined me for anyone else.” He strokes Joe, slowly at first, then a little quicker, trying to match his rhythm on Joe with Nicky’s fingers inside him.

“I hope not for me,” Nicky says, and then he pulls his fingers out to slide inside Booker.

Booker wails.

His insides cling to Nicky as he pulls back out, barely able to parse the feeling of him. He’s so long, longer than Booker remembers Joe being, and it feels like there’s no inch of his body that’s not entirely oversensitized.

“Can I?” Nicky asks.

“ _Please_.”

Nicky fucks him slow and steady, like a metronome. Booker knew he was patient, knew he was a sniper, but this—this—

Joe’s cock drips all over his fingers as Booker clumsily continues to stroke him, forgetting between thrusts that he should move his hand. He garbles out an apology, lost in the throb of his own cock, untouched and red between then.

“Shh,” Joe tells him, “it’s alright, my heart, let us—”

When his fingers slide into Booker alongside Nicky’s cock Booker thinks this will kill him, and he will come back only to die over and over of pleasure.

Time fractures as Nicky’s movements slow to a steady grind, as Joe’s fingers work him further open than Booker thinks a human is meant to go, until nothing but the molten sugar of their touch is left inside him and he thinks he’s going to come just from that.

It takes time, and work, and so much lube for Joe to settle in alongside Nicky, so much time that Booker is unable to do anything but breathe unsteadily through it, erection waxing and waning and then suddenly, sharply hard and aching when Joe presses against the ring of muscle at his ass so hard it stings.

He can do nothing but shake when they’re both inside, pressed tight to each other.

“Nicolò,” Joe murmurs, clearly overwhelmed. “I can feel his heartbeat.”

“I can feel yours,” Nicky answers, and Booker can _feel them_ rub against each other inside him, their hands linked together around his waist, their legs crisscrossed beneath him. 

There’s hardly enough leverage for either of them to thrust properly, but Booker thinks he would break if they tried. The soft rock of them against each other is enough, is too much, even for Nicky, who has been the steadiest so far. He falls apart first, caught between both their names, breath hitching, seed spilling hot inside Booker. His arms clench around Booker’s waist, pulling Joe tighter to him on Booker’s other side, and the sweat, the humidity between them, the clammy feel of skin on skin and the throb of Nicky inside him as he comes, has Booker following him over. He’s not sure how long it lasts, only that by the end of it, Joe is wild-eyed, smeared in Booker’s come even as Booker’s cock still twitches against his abdomen, hitching his hips up in tiny increments, fucking his come into Booker as deep as it will go.

It takes work to separate, and it turns out Booker’s thighs have cramped up from holding their position for too long, but when they finally collapse, messy, sweaty, filthy, onto the couch they’ll probably have to burn, Nicky groans, “Holy Mary, Mother of God.”

Booker laughs.

Joe smiles over at him. 

He links his left hand with Booker’s, his right thrown over Booker’s shoulder to touch Nicky.

“Now what?” Booker dares ask.

“Now,” Joe says, “we take a very long shower and get some sleep.”

“Then,” Nicky continues, “we take you back to Bruges and make some better memories.”

Booker has entirely run out of tears at this point, or he would start crying all over again.

It must read on his face, because as one, they lean in to kiss his cheeks, and, while there, find each other to kiss as well.

**Author's Note:**

> I have been on a JOURNEY with this one. Also pls don't think Joe and Nicky fixed Booker with the sex. In Bruges they have a nice long talk about coping mechanisms and therapy and stuff. I just had a headcanon about Booker being kind of numb in depression, including towards sex. Which Joe and Nicky get right through, because in the context of this fic, some of Booker's eternal sad is about being rejected by them. 
> 
> The title is from the Fratellis excellent "Slow", which contains the saddest lyrics I know: "lost my heart when my back was turned/if you see it could you let me know/and if you've got to leave me, baby/won't you do it slow?"
> 
> I'm on [tumblr](http://bewires.tumblr.com)


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